Paperboy

by Christopher Fowler

  After that conversation, I abandoned my efforts to behave more normally than anyone else in the country, and went back to being my normal abnormal self.

  1 Innovative comedy show that even the US president, Richard Nixon, appeared on.

  2 Hancock continued: ‘I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about.’ Some of his finest shows were wiped by the BBC and remain lost.

  31

  The Naming of Fears

  I LOOKED DOWN my list of fears and realized that fearfulness came as naturally to me as breathing.

  It seemed a more real state than being happy. I had not experienced anything directly tragic. The heavens had not fallen in on my life. Yet so much passed unspoken that there was a danger we might all drift along from birth to death in a state of suspended animation, never waking up and noticing the powerful undercurrents that swept us along. More and more, I understood why writers like Waugh and Woolf and Dickens and Forster treated their characters like feathers floating in fast-running gutters. Perhaps there was nothing you could do until you gathered speed and were swept down the drain.

  If I could not write about being an active part of the world, I could at least write about my fear of it.

  Uncapping my handsome Waterman fountain pen, a purchase made with my Star Letter gains, I began a story about a power cut, and being stranded alone in the silent darkness, only to discover that there was something else in the room with me, some great darker-than-dark object that could not be named without terrible consequences.

  The bloody thing leaked everywhere, spreading great stains of navy-blue Quink ink. I switched to a Biro.

  I tried to put a name to my fears. Then I tried to sell the story. Oddly enough, nobody at Yachts and Yachting wanted to publish a gloomy odyssey into a schoolboy’s dark recesses of the soul.

  More oddly still, my father really seemed to hate me now. It was as though he thought I had adopted this latest persona – pretending to be a regular son – for the sole purpose of embarrassing him. I couldn’t understand why trying to be normal had made me look so weird. Surely I was just doing what everyone did in our house? After all, Bill was pretending to be a well-balanced father and husband, despite the fact that he had once again stopped speaking to Kath and went out of his way to avoid me and everyone else, even hiding behind the door when a neighbour came to call. Kath pretended to be a doting wife and mother, even though she had suffered a nervous breakdown that no one was allowed to mention, and had fled to Russia without telling anyone. We were so determined to be normal that when we came home one evening to find that the dog had gone mad, spraying blood and vomit around the walls before dropping dead in the lounge, Bill had merely dragged its carcass outside and buried it in the garden without a word. When my beloved cat Wobbles had died, he had made me carry its corpse outside in order to toughen me up. These days, I’d get trauma counselling.

  Kath needed to get out of the stifling, thick-walled house that kept so much out and let nothing in. Her experience of different types of work was ten times greater than her husband’s, to the point where she had now run the entire gamut of legal employment. Her latest job involved deploying teams of housewives to deliver free samples of fabric softener, but they hadn’t managed to reach their targets, so the entire house was stacked with thousands of gelatinous envelopes of softener and everything reeked of sickly-sweet chemicals, a scientist’s approximation of the scent of roses. As the sachets grew warm and burst, they seeped into the wallpaper and carpets, staining everything cobalt blue.

  Bill concentrated on grooming Steven to become a professional spanner-holder, and it worked because his youngest son was so gentle and well behaved that he did it with unquestioning loyalty. Steven clearly had his own anxieties, but his uncomplaining nature meant that he lost out in the battle for attention. His dyslexia and shyness went unnoticed until they were ingrained in his personality like the streaks in the faux-wood hall staircase. Even so, it would have been obvious to anyone, had they looked, that he was the only member of the family to approximate normality without consciously having to take a run at it.

  Bill knew I conspired with Kath against him – he had seen the pair of us creeping down to the end of the garden together from his observation post at the window. He badly needed an ally of his own, but with no mechanism for creating one via the usual parental channels of emotional blackmail, he went spectacularly overboard on the presents. By buying Steven his own motorbike years before the poor kid could drive, we could all start considering the possibility of grotesque road accidents at the earliest available opportunity.

  Bill seemed angry that I should be indulged by my mother, and especially that I might be allowed to choose my own path in life. After all, he came from a long line of men who had been set upon a track of minimal education and backbreaking work until the day their clothes were put in a box and given to the Salvation Army. I didn’t understand it – surely my father should have been rejoicing that times were changing enough to allow a break in tradition. He didn’t, though, because the changes were coming too late for him.

  Through the passing years, Bill remained an enigma. Each time I thought we had finally reached a state of truce, the dream of an alliance slipped away once more, the warmth dissipated and my father retreated more deeply into inarticulate isolation, until there could be no more hope of a reconciliation.

  When Steven met his first girlfriend and fell in love with her, the pattern was finally altered. Rather than bringing her back to spend time with the family, my brother shot from Cyril Villa to her house like a scalded cat, and was wise enough to stay there. Her parents were normal. They liked each other, and doted on their children. They didn’t pass the years locked in arcane wars of attrition. I think it came as a bit of a shock for Steven to discover that our family did not set the standard for normality.

  It didn’t take Bill long to see how alone he would soon become, but he did not know how to make amends. Instead, he took out his growing anger on me. Every time I entered the room, he got himself into a state of barely suppressed fury, spoiling for a fight.

  I passed my exams with good results. One day I was given a piece of advice from a retiring teacher. ‘Boys are terribly single-minded, they only do well in the subjects they care about,’ said the old man, who was permanently covered in chalk dust and whose name, appropriately enough, was Mr Scholar. ‘What subjects don’t you like?’

  ‘Maths, physics, chemistry,’ I told him.

  ‘And what are your favourites?’

  ‘English, art, history, economics.’

  ‘Then stop revising the former at once and put all your efforts into the latter. The teachers won’t care when they’ve realized that you’ve given up the ghost, I promise you. They only notice the ones who keep trying.’ As he headed off, Mr Scholar paused to hitch his raggedy gown up to his shoulders like a tired night-club hostess. ‘Remember what I said,’ he called back. ‘Nobody gets points for being a nice person. Nice makes you invisible. There’s another lot coming up behind you. To us, you’re already last year’s class. You don’t have to care about what we think.’

  I followed Mr Scholar’s instructions. I intensified the focus of my studies, vanishing within the house to become a pallid, slender ghost who occasionally emerged from my bedroom to eat or wash.

  Friendless and determined to be unloved, my father remained stranded at the window as if keeping an eye out for enemy battleships. He glowered at me each time I passed with a stack of books cradled in my arms. He warned me there would be no money to go to university, and told me not to even think about the idea. He took to muttering insults under his breath.

  ‘I think you need to look for a flat before your father ends up killing you,’ said my mother one day.

  ‘He’s killing you,’ I countered. ‘Look at yourself, all the weight you’ve lost. When was the last time you did anything just for yourself? He won’t let you out of the house unless he comes with you. You can’t cope wit
h the job and this place and him. I could stay for a while longer …’

  ‘And what good would that do? You know what will happen. It will drag you down as well. Better that one of us gets away. Go and find yourself, fall in love, have some adventures, get hurt a few times. I should have taken the chance when I had it, but now …’ She twisted the thin gold band that had grown loose on her finger. ‘Some days I wonder what would have happened if I had gone away and stayed away.’

  ‘You could have gone off and had an affair. Instead you went to a Russian museum.’

  ‘Who would have wanted me, the wrong side of thirty-five and unable to have children? I’m not one of those dolly birds up in London. Besides, if I’d had an affair I might have got a taste for it and not come back. And I couldn’t do that, because who would have looked after you? You are my greatest hope for the future, but you must leave before he hurts you so badly that you become like him.’

  A few days later, I rented a minuscule room above a shoe shop in Belsize Park, and moved out. I felt uncomfortable leaving my mother and brother behind, but as I seemed to be the cause of so much ill feeling, it was the only solution.

  I found myself saddled with a pair of flatmates in the rooms on either side of mine. Kevin was a red-eyed corduroy-clad spectre who read Sartre aloud by night and sold advertising space by day, and was torn apart by the compromises he had to make in order to earn a wage. Sarah was a plum-voiced county girl who wore cheesecloth smocks, and passed her mornings sitting on the stairs in tears, refusing to go to her office because she felt too fat. They were messy and messed up, but I loved them because they were in a different kind of mess than the ones I was used to. None of us knew each other’s pasts, nor did we need to know. We accepted, and were accepted in turn, for the help and comfort we could give each other, without sulks, strops, threats or year-long silences.

  I continued to read voraciously, drifting into literature’s byways – although to even class many such books as ‘literature’ would have turned critics apoplectic at the time. Amongst the modern authors, playwrights and lyricists who became alternative gods were B. S. Johnson, Hunter S. Thompson, Stephen Sondheim, David Nobbs, Kander and Ebb, Peter Tinniswood, J. G. Ballard, Alan Sillitoe, Charles Wood, Keith Waterhouse, Michael Moorcock, Peter Nichols and a million others. Best of all, I could discuss them with my new flatmates, who were also – whisper the word – readers.

  I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency. I spent my evenings in the smoky sepia-walled Railway Tavern in Belsize Park, writing short stories, killing the ones that rang false. When I was less than entirely dissatisfied with something I had written, I would post it home to my mother for criticism. Kath found herself adopting my former role as a reviewer, the difference being that she was clear-eyed and merciless. Still, nothing I wrote really seemed to work. I started to think about stopping, and then one day I simply stopped.

  Instead, I concentrated on doing my job well, and tried not to think about what might have been.

  32

  White Paper

  I WOULD NEVER have tried again if it hadn’t been for the golfball.

  The Selectric golfball typewriter1 had been thrown out of the room laughingly referred to as my ‘office’ when a department updated its equipment. I repaired it, scavenged a desk that had last had its drawers emptied before the Festival of Britain, and borrowed a kitchen chair. The extra furniture meant that it was impossible to shut the door of my rented room.

  I wasn’t due at work for two hours yet – time for one last try. I seated myself, threaded a fresh white page beneath the bar of the typewriter and waited, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. I lined up a bottle of Snopake whitening fluid and a packet of Tippex sheets on top of the ream of paper that I hoped I might be inspired to use up.

  There was nothing, in theory, to stop me from producing a masterpiece.

  The clock in the hall ticked. I stared at the page. The seat wasn’t very comfortable. I waited and stared. My throat was dry, so I rose and made a cup of tea. I drank it, returned to my seat. The bare page was making me snowblind. I tried to think of an opening sentence, like those tortured artists in movies who furrow their brows for thirty seconds before being hit with the inspiration to write something like ‘The 1812 Overture’.

  The white page drew me in. White, white. As white as a lab coat.

  The scientist, grizzled, defeated, far into his middle years, had almost lost hope of ever finding a cure for the ageing process.

  He raised his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed at his tired eyes. Nine days without sleep or food was too much for anyone, even a Nobel-prize-winning genius with a loving, devoted, busty wife who had given up her career as a former Miss Sweden for her brainy husband. Pacing the length of the laboratory, he returned to his test charts and the electronic machine that showed a squiggly green line measuring something … don’t know what, work that bit out later … and hoped against hope that this one last test would prove successful. He checked his – what do you call them? – Petri dishes, and saw that the culture in Experiment 857B had changed colour in the last few minutes. Placing the test tube in a centrifuge, he spun it until – what did cultures do, separate like bad milk? And what would that show? It was no good, I couldn’t do this, I had failed science at O level. With a shrug of disappointment at not becoming a household name, the scientist dissolved into random atoms.

  Back to the page. White, white. As white as snow.

  Lance Quest, the renowned explorer, was ploughing knee-deep through an arctic blizzard, his beard smothered in stalactites of ice. His toes were frostbitten; two of them were loose inside his right boot, the one that had been gnawed by the enraged polar bear. Lance could not find his tent. Had it been ripped away in the storm, or could it have fallen into the crevasse caused by the landing jets of the alien space ship? No, that was The Thing … Desperately the explorer searched the hostile landscape … he searched … the explorer was lost in a haze of snow … lost … but there was the red nylon tent just ahead of him, in fluttering, battered tatters. His supplies had all been blown away across the inhospitable tundra. He would have to eat the last of the dogs. What, raw? Or was he seriously going to stumble across a lighter and some kindling sticks, maybe a rotisserie? Sod it. Snow covered everything completely until the white page came back.

  White, white. As white as stardust.

  Stella Thrust was the kind of Space welder you’d surrender your last tank of oxygen for. In the velvet cosmos, she clung to the hull of the ship just as her silver spacesuit clung to the curves of her voluptuous body. She was repairing the airlocks as if she had been born to ride the unmanned intergalactic big-rig to Riga. The company had been lucky to get her; no one else wanted to work on such a volatile load, especially as their journey would take them within the gravitational pull of the sun – check to see if the sun has a gravitational pull – but then Stella – too obvious a name? – Stella was determined to take the assignment, because the only man she had ever loved was chained up in the ship’s freezing loading bay, and only she could save him from certain death. Wait a minute – unmanned? Who was flying the damned thing? Autopilot, that was it. Then what was her lover doing chained in the hold? Too complicated, I was getting painted into a corner … Stella was tapping her gloved fingers on the hull, waiting. She had work to do and I was holding her up. Go on then, I dared, do it without me. Stella waved two fingers at me and shattered into a smattering of sparkling stardust, against the flaring of the sun.

  Desert Sun.

  The fierce white desert sun … was hammering down on another figure, Lavinia Buncle, a beautiful, sexy red-haired heiress whose jeep had broken down in the Australian desert. She had driven here to escape the … er … Australian Constabulary, or whatever the local police force was called, after the daring robbery she had conducted just to annoy her father in Melbourne. Or Perth. If either of them was near a desert. Sweat tri
ckled down Lavinia’s tanned cleavage. Red earth clung to her khaki boots, as if the ground itself was trying to keep her here, dragging her back into the parched, dead aboriginal land. Her lips were cracked and peeling. She needed to find water soon. And moisturizer. If she could just find a – some kind of cactus, wasn’t it, and you stuck a knife in the side and could drink the sap or something? And it had Aloe Vera in it as well? I probably had its name in a book somewhere.

  Clambering over the bed, I began pulling out old travel manuals I had been collecting, but could not find one on Australia. The books I had removed created a gap in my bookcase that I noticed was filled with dust and bits of fluff. It couldn’t have been vacuumed in ages.

  I went and borrowed the Hoover, and spent the next hour cleaning the room, before realizing that I was late for work.

  The whole grisly, tortured process went on like this for days, then weeks, then months. Finally I grew tired of dusting the Selectric, drew the plastic cover over it and returned it to the top of the wardrobe, where it sat with all the half-formed arctic explorers, sexy bank robbers, frustrated scientists and thwarted lovers, until they faded and greyed with dust, crumbling away to nothing.

  At first I was disappointed that I would probably never achieve my dream, but the feeling faded to a dull, distant ache, something only felt on cold, wet mornings. Then it even became difficult to recall what the dream had been. When I tried to summon up my ambitions, there was only a blank stillness where the obsessive enthusiasms had once lived. I guessed I had become an adult, because adults always shielded their feelings, and rarely showed what they really felt. It was a system that protected you while simultaneously robbing you of something essential, but I had seen what could happen to adults without it; they exposed themselves too much and got damaged, like plants left in fierce sunshine. Perhaps that was why such people were often described as ‘burned out’.